Warlock Demo Allows Assessment Of The Arcane

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On the cold floor, a summoning circle has been drawn and, around it, several Paradox employees sway, their forms disguised by wizard’s robes. A susurration builds to a roar, like the scratching of the pebbles at Dover Beach, the air trembles, twisting into new intangible forms, and then a demo version of Warlock: Master of the Arcane appears. Unnatural, I know, but it’s just the way things are done in that neck of the woods. Bet you didn’t know that Crusader Kings II was actually built by a blacksmith, hammering away in his forge? Fact. The Warlock demo can be found on Steam and it includes the tutorial, a preset map, two enemy mages and one to play as. The full game allows customisation of both mages and maps. My thoughts on the beta are here and we’ll have more on the game as the May 8th launch approaches.

I finally registered here so that I could – as per Internet S.O.P. – tell you that you are wrong.

As a card-carrying member of the majoity I can tell you that we have spent 5 minutes viewing a Civ 5 trailer on youtube to be weighed against hundreds of hours of MoM. If this doesn’t run on Wine then I’ll go so far as to buy a Windows license. Majority. That’s me.

I can confirm that Majesty 2 sucks. I’ve heard some people say it’s decent. None of those people have played the first game. I LOVED the original Majesty. Majesty 2 keeps the general style of play while removing many of the things I loved from the original and improves nothing but the graphics.

Art is made out of the pieces of other art. That is how it works. All I care about is people doing things right. Frankly I think there isn’t much harm in people trying to improve on tested but flawed forms (Civ 5). You don’t want a million clones obviously, but there isn’t really a lot of competition in Civ’s space and I think that is one of the reason they can get away with releasing such unpolished products.

Me too. I was not implying that taking inspiration is a bad thing, and I still quite like the most obvious offence here – one can’t avoid noticing how very, very similar they styled the UI. And I do really like that design.

So, this game is Steam-exclusive then? Well, there went that whole wet dream down the toilet. It states on the pre-order page at GamersGate that the DRM is Steamworks…so then why would anyone else other than Steam members buy it? Holy shit on the marketing of this product…

Yes, it’s so astonishing that a company that relies on digital distribution for a significant portion of its revenue would opt to exclude it from the digital distribution service with the deepest market penetration. Truly, truly astounding.

I think Paradox’s rationale is that they’re trying to put it on as many services as possible, to increase exposure if nothing else. Depending on how much GamersGate charges in fees, etc., it doesn’t strike me as a particularly bewildering move.

They could have it on steam without using the DRM portion of Steamworks. If they are making steam a requirement I imagine they are using it for online play and/or dlc distribution or they just feel the need to have DRM and know steamworks will cause the least amount of hotwater for them.

Maybe you’ve got some of them Blue Coin things… or it’s a better price on GamersGate… or you prefer to give the money to GamersGate… or you tossed a coin over which of the two services to use. Or, you have an irrational hatred of Valve but really want to play the game.

Because a lot of us have 10% discounts on GamersGate and get blue coins that let us buy other games for free?

And honestly, Steam is more than a DD service: it is a DRM model AND a content distribution service. If Warlock supports modding, they might decide to use Steam Workshop. Warlock already has DLC, and Steam provides a good way to distribute that.

I am sorry if Paradox doesn’t have the same system of beliefs as you (I doubt the employees are sorry though), but you can always choose to not buy the game.

Why use DRM?
The simplest answer: It is a security blanket. It makes the publishers feel better. If anyone else feels better depends upon who is asking, who is answering, and where the question is being asked.

Is Steam a good DRM?
For most people, it is a surprisingly good DRM model. It is non-obtrusive (most gamers don’t have too big of an objection to having a chat program open), it sort of works offline (“sort of” being the key modifier :p), provides enough benefits that most gamers don’t mind (especially considering the alternatives), and it actually IS surprisingly effective in that a lot of pirates are wary of Steam cracks since they might very well have some (legal) games they don’t want to risk (if there IS a risk is another question).
Short answer: It is good because it is the most accepted DRM model available.

Let’s be fair. If I don’t use STEAM, I’m not choosing to not play a particular game. I’m choosing to not play almost every new game released.

And yes, that’s apparently the situation in 2012.

What would be nice is to find an online source that lets me know which new games are free of such DRM, so I can simply ignore the STEAM only games and not have to find out the situation for each and every game individually. Then STEAM users wouldn’t need to bother with my futile, rage filled rants, and I wouldn’t have to be infuriated by yet another STEAM exclusive offering.

Because Gamersgate gives you cash-back on every purchase and has numerous other benefits that Steam lacks? Also because Gamersgate has a far more reliable and often faster download service that doesn’t flake out every time there’s a sale on anything.

Indeed I have no idea what people have against Steam. It is a great service that has done a lot for PC gaming. But the 14-25 set just loves to rage against the machine regardless of whether the machine is good or bad.

I do not personally know a single person who has had a negative experience with Steam, and the ones I hear about online are frequently people breaking the ToS and then crying about the consequences.

Mostly I think younger gamers don’t like it because it makes piracy harder and they have little to no income and so rely on piracy.

its not perfect nothing is, but it is certainly a lot better than 90% of the other large businesses I have to deal with.

You can still gift games through Steam (not sure about other services).

Video games are hardly the only type of media for which retail is dying. Books, newspapers, movies, music will all be digitally distributed in the future. Broadband internet penetration isn’t quite where it needs to be to complete that transition, which is why retail continues to persist. But rest assured – high-speed internet is the 21st century’s electricity, and it will soon become just as widespread.

Gifting something on a digital service is nothing like giving a gift in the traditional sense. There’s no physical object, the gifting party has to have their own account, there’s usually not even any way to have the gift arrive at an appropriate time, as most digital gifting is instant.

And yes, it’s going to get to the point where you can’t give books or music either, and that’s sad too. Physical objects are a good thing, ephemeral data has a way of disappearing.

This is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. You clearly haven’t ever spoken to anyone who actually works in the industry. It makes piracy quite a bit harder. That was (and frankly still is) the main point.

“You clearly haven’t ever spoken to anyone who actually works in the industry.It makes piracy quite a bit harder. That was (and frankly still is) the main point.”

I have spoken to 12 year old playing cracked games. They disagree.

I am aware you can download a crack for any game within a week of release. It takes about 5 minutes. If you think running the crack that is packaged with an iso makes piracy any harder you are deluding yourself.

Sure some team makes the crack which can be hard but they enjoy it and do it for fun. For everyone else its an extra .exe click or a copy/paste.

Sure that is the point but it fails horribly and only has any serious negative effect on paying customers.

I’m almost 50, always buy my games and am a lifelong game hobbyist. I have very old games that I still play, and intend to continue to play these games. None of them are pirated.

The issue is one of a continual, unending ownership of intellectual property – not necessarily by the people responsible for that property, but by SOMEBODY. And that someone will never be me – not unless I buy the STEAM company outright from VALVE. Then (of course) I would get to own not only my own games, but those of everyone else who has bought a game with STEAM DRM.

But like others have said, the debate is long since over. STEAM wins, we lose. Honest players who refuse to buy into STEAM, and who won’t sink to piracy, must content themselves with older titles released before STEAM existed. If we don’t like it, too bad.

Not a STEAM debate. I don’t like STEAM, won’t use STEAM, and don’t intend to change my mind. Meanwhile almost all new computer gamers must have STEAM or some similar “service” running to function. Clearly many gamer like STEAM for the cheap games and automatic patches, enough so that those who refuse to buy into STEAM’s intrusiveness are apparently not worthy of concern.

There’s nothing to debate, STEAM has won the Internets and has taken over my hobby whether I like it or not.

Clearly it’s unfortunate for me, and anyone else who refuses to give up their ownership rights to STEAM. I won’t buy this game so long as a STEAM client is necessary for it to work, so I and anyone else with a similar attitude is screwed out of buying and playing what looks like a great game.

I’m curious though. RPS tends to rain on any game with some sort of DRM, but doesn’t seem to mind the DRM provided by Steam.

I will say as a consumer I really have come to appreciate Steam. The idea of box ownership has very little appeal to me, I haven’t traded a game in 15 years, I have stacks of game disks and cd-keys that are just collecting dust and scratches where my Steam games are ready to play in short order. Heck, I’ve re-bought most of my games on Steam, or converted by Blizzard disks to their online system. The last physical box I got was the Orange box, which is entirely steam based anyway.

The reason I have nothing against Steam is that the additional services provided outweight the negative impact of always-on DRM in my eyes. Of course I’ve never had trouble with offline mode when I needed it but I completely understand if other people dislike Steam because it doesn’t work for them.

I’ve moved country three times in the last five years. Of my once-massive physical collection of games barely two narrow shelves of boxes remain and half of those are out of action due to the loss of CD keys or scratches on disks – my entire 132 game Steam Library has moved seamlessly with me and every single game is still ready and eager to be downloaded and played at my whim.

It’s not the deepest game in the world but there’s plenty of stuff going on all over the place right from the first turn, so from the little I’ve played it’s hard to get bored. One interesting feature is that you’re only allowd one building per city size point, so the build order for cities and the role of each city is probably more interesting than many 4X games.

There is no documentation whatsoever on basic things like what influences city growth and how much precisely, what’s the full spell research tree and what’s the full unit and building tree, either in game or in the manual.

The manual is extremely short and highly incomplete and includes gems like “Flying units can cross almost any landscape types without penalties.” without specifying what the fuck “almost any landscape” is supposed to mean, or “КАРТИНКА ГОРОДА КРУПНЫМ ПЛАНОМ” in the middle of English text.

The UI makes it very easy to miss when a city has finished building stuff, resulting in letting it being idle, cannot give you combat odds if you can’t attack in one turn, and in general it looks superficially usable, but is in fact poorly implemented.

The game uses 1UPT, and since Civ5 couldn’t make it work, I doubt this game will; the AI doesn’t seem impressive, but I’m not yet any good at the game either, so not sure.

Overall it seems a rushed wannabe Civ5/MoM game where the graphics are the only thing they concentrated on and everything else has been cobbled together in a mediocre state.

I understand your points… I was underwhelmed by the whole experience. I think you just need to manage expectations. A lot of people are hoping for MoM depth but I don’t think the game is trying to deliver that. It’s kind of a 4X lite.

Some basic things in the UI are strange at first, but once you get the hang of it it’s pretty easy to zip through your turns.

I think city growth is just a function of the level of the city… It seems every 1000 population you can build a new structure (and the game is good at pointing out when you can build new buildings), and at a certain level the zone around it expands and you can build settlers with the city.

I was worried this game would make Fallen Enchantress obsolete, but far from it. This is 4X MoM-alike lite, whereas Fallen Enchantress seems to be offering the full depth package.

Some of these are legitimate complaints. Like you said, city growth, long-term spell research, and long-term building trees are unclear. However, I don’t know how you miss the alerts for buildings being completed and/or potential buildings being available. A series of little things pops up on the right at the beginning of every turn. They tell you whether you have units that haven’t moved, buildings that can be built, buildings that recently finished, and units that recently finished. It doesn’t tell you if you have spare capacity to produce units, but I don’t think you’re really supposed to be pumping units out constantly. In any case, you can queue them easily enough, and it does tell you when new units have been produced.

I found the interface -mostly- a success. I think they could fix the remaining issues, hopefully, with a few patches.

As for the game more generally, I was pretty much addicted from the word go. It remains to be seen how long that addiction will last. I have a feeling this game won’t get terribly deep. On the positive end, combat seems to be a -major- focus. Way more than Civ 5. The AI seems okay for now, but who knows what that means once I start to dig in.

I think you are the one who got the wrong idea of what the game is. This is not an economic game, and not a 1000 turns one like Civ, so 1UPT is a nonissue because you will never produce enough units to clog the map. There are no research trees, your spells are randomized so you have to adapt each game. City trees are very clear if you expand the building list, and it’s more on the HoMM side of building limits. The war stages of the game go: first one to get advanced unit (specially ghosts), first one to get premium units (black minotaurs), first one to level up army in other planes to attack neighbor.

It is not a wanabee because it never intended to be, it is just a subset of Fall from Heaven aiming for faster more dynamic games with things to do every turn. War is mandatory to survive as it is the only mean of victory.

Yeah, it seems that combat is really a focus here. I was fighting quite a bit from turn 1, and I think I was fighting every one of the 50 turns I played in the demo. This seems sort of like a 4x-light with combat emphasis.

In my games, even though they were in Normal-to-Hard difficulty, I was always at war with all other players. Building production is fast, and as I am almost always producing units there is no point in having them lying around because they won’t level up, and sending them to the planes is more of an endgame option, so war and production wars it is.

My race of choice were the undead because of the ghost unit. Give it a couple of defense perks and watch the enemy spend mana and magic units just trying to kill them, while you have your real units backing ghosts to finish any unit that comes near them. 1UPT works wonders here. Their nerfed state in release is all my fault :)

I’ve pre-ordered on the strength of this demo. The reduction in emphasis on balancing resources for research in comparison to Civ V meant that I found it easier to concentrate on the exploration and warfare aspects. By the end of the 50 turn limit I was escalating a three-way border war with neighbouring empires, and I feel I’ve barely scratched the surface of the game.

It very much reminds me of a Civ 5 Fall from Heaven, which is just fine by me and the asking price is quite fair.

There certainly are some quirks to the game and I think mechanic wise made a few missteps at least in the demo

1) Game seems to vastly favor just spamming settlers as cities grow organically, and there is no penalty for creating a settler, unless I’m missing something.
2) Desperately needs a decent manual / wiki(the official pdf I found online was garbage). No way of telling what resource tiles give you, what each race’s strength/weaknesses / unique units are or a clear picture of the building tech tree or spell tech tree.
3) UI needs some work. It wasn’t horrible once you got used to it, but still a bit rough.

The big problem is in civ (and FFH) games settlers have a real cost associated with them. Excess cities harmed your economy / happiness if they weren’t productive, settlers prevented growth when built and took a reasonable amount of time to build early on.

However towns in Warlock just grow / produce / build at a base rate that can’t be changed, so additional towns are always productive / good, and it also vastly favors building them early so they can develop as quickly as possible.

I don’t really mind them simplifying mechanics, I’m just concerned from the demo that the dynamic is out of whack and over inflates the importance of a frenzy land grab early on.

The only balance factor for this is that even earlygame war is on, so while you’re making a settler somebody else is making army and leveling it up, and as the game is “fast paced” maybe those turns your city needs to grow are not returning the investment.